Perdido Street Station Read Online Free PDF

nose,
Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him
tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a
flaccid wound.
    Joshua nodded at Isaac
and, with his fingers, carefully held his mouth closed over a straw,
sucked greedily at his cider.
    Isaac headed for the
back of the room. The bar, in one corner, was very low, about three
feet from the ground. Behind it, in a trough of dirty water, wallowed
Silchristchek the landlord.
    Sil lived and worked
and slept in the tub, hauling himself from one end to the other with
his huge, webbed hands and frog’s legs, his body wobbling like
a bloated testicle, seemingly boneless. He was ancient and fat and
grumpy, even for a vodyanoi. He was a bag of old blood with limbs,
without a separate head, his big curmudgeonly face poking out from
the fat at the front of his body.
    Twice a month he
scooped the water out from around him and had his regulars pour fresh
buckets over him, farting and sighing with pleasure. The vodyanoi
could spend at least a day in the dry without ill-effects, but Sil
could not be bothered. He oozed surly indolence, and chose to do so
in his filthy water. Isaac could not help feeling that Sil debased
himself as a kind of aggressive show. He seemed to relish being
more-disgusting-than-thou.
    In the early days,
Isaac had drunk here out of a youthful delight in plumbing the depths
of squalor. Mature now, he frequented more salubrious inns for
pleasure, returning to Sil’s hovel only because it was so close
to his work, and, increasingly, unexpectedly, for research purposes.
Sil had taken to providing him with experimental samples he needed.
    Stinking piss-coloured
water slopped over the edges of the tub as Sil wriggled his way
towards Isaac.
    "What you having,
‘Zaac?" he barked.
    "Kingpin."
    Isaac flipped a deuce
into Sil’s hand. Sil brought down a bottle from one of the
shelves behind him. Isaac sipped the cheap beer and slid onto a
stool, grimacing as he sat in some dubious liquid.
    Sil sat back in his
tub. Without looking at Isaac, he began a monosyllabic, idiot
conversation about the weather, about the beer. He went through the
motions. Isaac said just enough to keep the discourse alive.
    On the counter were
several crude figures, rendered in water that seeped into the grain
of the old wood before his eyes. Two were rapidly dissolving, losing
their integrity and becoming puddles as Isaac watched. Sil idly
scooped up another handful from his tub and kneaded it. The water
responded like clay, holding the shape Sil gave it. Scraps of the
dirt and discoloration of the tub eddied inside it. Sil pinched the
figure’s face and made a nose, squeezed the legs to the size of
small sausages. He perched the little homunculus in front of Isaac.
    "That what you’re
after?" he asked.
    Isaac swallowed the
rest of his beer.
    "Cheers, Sil.
Appreciate it."
    Very carefully, he blew
on the little figure until it fell backwards into his cupped hands.
It splashed a little, but he could feel its surface tension hold. Sil
watched with a cynical smile as Isaac scurried to get the figurine
out of the pub and to his laboratory.
    Outside the wind had
picked up a little. Isaac sheltered his prize and walked quickly up
the little alley that adjoined The Dying Child with Paddler Way and
his workshop-home. He pushed open the green doors with his bum and
backed into the building. Isaac’s laboratory had been a factory
and a warehouse years ago, and its huge, dusty floorspace swamped the
little benches and retorts and blackboards that perched in its
corners.
    From the two corners of
the floor came yelled greetings. David Serachin and Lublamai
Dadscatt—rogue-scientists like Isaac, with whom he shared the
rent and the space. David and Lublamai used the ground floor, each
filling a corner with their tools, separated by forty feet of empty
wooden boards. A refitted waterpump jutted from the floor between
their ends of the room.